An Inconvenient Woman (66 page)

“Flo?” he called out again.

Slowly he walked out of her bedroom back into the living room. The back of the gray satin sofa was facing toward him. There was a pair of her shoes on the floor, one halfway under the sofa, the other by a chair. A brass candlestick with a dragon crawling up the side had been dropped on the floor, its bloody base staining the white carpet. He leaned down and picked it up. There were pieces of red hair mixed in with the blood. He rose and walked very slowly over to the sofa and, with dread, looked down at the body of Flo March. Her red hair was matted with blood. Her hands covered her face, as if to protect it, and the sapphire in her ring was smashed, as was the finger on which it was worn. There were contusions on her forearm.

All the blood drained from Philip’s face as he looked down at his beautiful friend. “Oh, Flo,” he breathed out. On the bar was a telephone. When he picked it up, there was no dial tone, and he remembered that it had been disconnected. He ran out of the house. In order to get to Faye Converse’s house next door, he had to run down the long steep driveway to Azelia Way and then run up the driveway next door. He rang and rang the bell, but there was no answer. He called out her name, “Miss Converse!” and then called out the name of Glyceria, the maid, but the house was closed up. Faye Converse had gone to New York to promote her new perfume, and Glyceria had not arrived yet for work.

He ran down to Azelia Way and then up to Flo’s house again, hoping that the keys to her car would be in it, but they were not. Again he ran down the driveway and then down Azelia Way to Coldwater Canyon. He was sweating from all the running. The heavy morning traffic down the canyon had started. He tried to hail a ride, but the cars passed him by without stopping. He began to run frantically. A passing motorist dialed the Beverly Hills police on his cellular telephone.

“There’s a crazy guy running up and down Coldwater Canyon,” he said.

•   •   •

Blondell, Pauline Mendelson’s maid, who had been with Pauline for over twenty years, tapped on the door of her bedroom and entered without waiting for a reply. She was carrying a small tray with a cup of tea, which she placed on a table by Pauline’s bed. She went over to the curtains and pulled them back to let in the morning light.

“For heaven’s sake. What are you doing, Blondell? What time is it?”

“Early. Are you awake?” asked Blondell.

“Just slightly,” said Pauline. “Come back in an hour. I’m going to try to sleep some more.”

“I thought you would want to know—”

“I’ve had a terribly sleepless night again.”

“—that that woman who was in the church at Mr. Mendelson’s funeral—”

“Oh, puleeze. I don’t want to be awakened to hear anything about her,” said Pauline.

“She’s dead, Mrs. Mendelson.”

“What?” Pauline sat up in bed.

“Murdered,” replied Blondell.

“What?” Pauline said again.

“It’s on the news.”

“How?”

“Beaten in the face and head with a brass candlestick.”

“Good God. Do they know who did it?”

“They’ve arrested a man who was running wildly away from the house down Coldwater Canyon.”

“Do they know who it is?”

“They didn’t give his name.”

In the old Charles Boyer house, Arnie Zwillman was doing laps on his treadmill when he watched the same newscast that Blondell had seen. He was not bewildered by the reports of the death of Flo March, that troublesome creature—or fucking cunt, as he was more likely to call her—but he was utterly bewildered by the reports of an unidentified man running wildly away from the scene of the crime. It bothered him enough to turn off the treadmill and go to the telephone in his workout room.

“What the fuck is going on?” he asked when the person whom he dialed answered.

“They arrested the wrong guy,” was the answer he received.

•   •   •

Philip Quennell, in custody in the Beverly Hills police station, remained totally calm as he was fingerprinted and booked. His attitude and demeanor were a source of immense annoyance to the policeman, Officer Whitbeck, who had picked him up on Coldwater Canyon and arrested him fleeing from the scene of the crime.

“You’re in deep shit, fella,” he said more than once.

“No, I’m not,” replied Philip. He knew that in time it would be ascertained that Flo March had been dead for several hours by the time he arrived at her house. He knew that Camilla Ebury would give evidence that he had spent the night at her house. At least fifty people would remember that they had seen him at the early morning AA meeting on Robertson Boulevard. Rose Cliveden would swear that she had talked to him on Robertson Boulevard at seven-twenty. His car would be discovered parked on Robertson Boulevard, and the taxi driver of the Beverly Hills cab would be located and have on his log the hour that he had driven Philip to the house on Azelia Way.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that I would have suggested taking Officer Whitbeck back to the house on Azelia Way if it had been I who crashed in her head,” Philip said to the captain.

“Get yourself a lawyer and tell him your story,” said Captain Nelson.

On the television news, a detective from homicide determined the cause of Flo March’s death as multiple skull fractures and intercerebral hemorrhage due to blunt force trauma. He said it was not simply a blow that had killed Miss March, but blows, many blows. He estimated nine. Pauline Mendelson watched on the television set in her library. The detective described the blows as gaping blunt lacerations of the scalp. More than one of the blows, possibly as many as four, would have been sufficient to kill, although it was believed that the fatal blow was one to the left side of the head, over the ear. The face of the young woman was, by contrast, relatively unmarked. Robbery was immediately ruled out as a motive, as a yellow diamond earring, thought to be of considerable value, remained in one ear lobe, and a sapphire ring, smashed by the murder weapon, remained on the victim’s ring finger. There
were multiple lacerations on both hands, as well as fractures of the fingers of both hands.

“They have arrested Philip Quennell,” said Sims Lord, later.

“Philip Quennell! No, that couldn’t be true,” said Pauline, in disbelief.

“It’s true. They found him running down Coldwater Canyon away from the house.”

“That doesn’t mean he killed her.”

“People do not speak well of him.”

“What sort of people?”

“Casper Stieglitz, the producer, for one. Marty Lesky, the head of Colossus Pictures, for another. And Jules, you must know, despised him.”

“That doesn’t mean he killed her,” repeated Pauline. “I don’t believe it.” She rose and walked around the library. “Oh, my God. How could this happen? Do you know something, Sims? If I had paid Flo March the lousy million dollars she wanted, none of this would have happened.” She went to the telephone.

“Who are you calling?”

“Camilla Ebury.”

In the weeks of his residence there, Lonny Edge had never felt comfortable in Beverly Hills. Even in the privacy of the secluded house on Azelia Way, people in such lowly capacities as the man who cleaned the swimming pool had looked askance at him when he paraded nude by the pool, and Trent Muldoon, the television star, had given him the same kind of disapproving look when he answered the door with only a towel wrapped around his middle. Lonny Edge was not used to indifference when he showed his disrobed body. He felt slighted when he did not observe desire in the eye of his beholder.

“They’re a big bunch of snobs in Beverly Hills,” he complained during that time to his friends at the Viceroy Coffee Shop. “Even the cops in Beverly Hills have attitude.”

When the cops from Beverly Hills knocked on the door and identified themselves at 7204¼ Cahuenga Boulevard, accompanied by their fellow officers from the station house on La Brea, Lonny Edge was nervous at first, thinking that his immoral past had caught up with him.

“Just a moment,” he yelled out, tearing down from the
wall the poster from his best-known video,
Hard, Harder, Hardest
, in which his jeans were revealingly dropped to his pubic hair.

“Yes?” he said, when he opened the door.

“May we come in?” asked Captain Nelson.

“Yeah. What’s the matter?”

“We wanted to ask you some questions.”

“About what?”

“Flo March.”

His relief knew no bounds. “Oh, Flo. Sure, I know Flo. She’s my roommate. Not exactly roommate, per se. Housemate is a better word for it. Why?”

“When did you see her last?”

“Last night I saw her. Why? I’ve been living there in her house on Azelia Way. But we were moving out today. I better get over there. The movers were coming by ten. She was supposed to be here last night. I don’t know why she didn’t come, and the phone is out of order, or disconnected, or something, I don’t know what. I didn’t want her to stay alone there last night, because she was depressed and all. What’s this all about? You know who Flo March is, don’t you?” He said her name as if it were the name of a movie star that they should recognize. “She’s been in all the papers. She was the mistress of Jules Mendelson. You know, the billionaire? With all the art? A close personal friend of a lot of the Presidents. Lived up on top of the mountain, at the estate called Clouds? You know of Pauline Mendelson? The socialite?”

The police officers stared at Lonny. Finally, Captain Nelson spoke. “Would you come with us, please, Mr. Edge?”

“Where?”

“To the Beverly Hills police station.”

“Hey, what the fuck is this, man?”

“Just routine questioning,” said Officer Whitbeck.

“You can’t routine question here? What are my neighbors going to say, me going out of here with a whole posse of cops?”

As the two policemen approached him, Lonny made a dash for the front door. One of the two leapt after Lonny in a pantherlike motion and made a lunge for him, grasping him around the chest from behind.

“What’s going on here?” screamed Lonny, fighting off the assault.

When he was subdued, the officers jerked his hands behind
his back and clamped handcuffs on his wrists. Another knelt on the floor and clamped shackles on his feet.

“How come you killed your girlfriend, Lonny?” asked Officer Whitbeck.

“Flo? Flo’s dead? Oh, no. Oh, Flo. Oh, no. You’re not going to pin this on me. No way. I know too much about all these people. Pauline Mendelson’s son killed Hector Paradiso. Kippie Petworth, that’s his name,” he screamed. With one officer on each side of him, they pulled him out the door and across the courtyard to the stairs that went down to Cahuenga Boulevard. “I saw him. I was there. Kippie Petworth, Pauline Mendelson’s son, shot Hector five times, and Jules Mendelson covered it up and told the world it was a suicide. That’s why they killed Flo March. She knew. She knew too much.”

“The guy’s nuts,” said Officer Whitbeck to Captain Nelson.

When Glyceria, Flo’s friend, who had helped her pack to move, showed up for work at Faye Converse’s house, she was immediately made aware of the dire happenings in the house next door. By that time Flo’s body had been removed to the morgue, and the news of her death was in every newspaper and newscast. Two men in two separate jails had been booked for the murder. The driveway in front of Flo’s house was filled with reporters, some of whom peeked in the windows.

Avoiding them, Glyceria made her way to the back of the house, to the swimming pool area where she used to sit with Flo in the early days of their friendship, when little Astrid brought them together. It surprised her that the sliding glass door with the smashed window was ajar. She wondered why there was not a police guard on duty, or why a house where a murder had taken place was not sealed.

For a six-hour period, two men in two separate jails were booked for the same murder. When finally Philip Quennell was released from the Beverly Hills jail, with abject apologies for having been wrongfully booked, he emerged into a glare of television lights and strobe cameras. His money and credit cards and watch and cuff links were still in the sealed manila envelope that the arresting officer had handed back to him as he was discharged. His tie had been lost. He felt soiled and looked weary as the reporters crowded around him.

“Flo March was my friend,” he said. “I am heartbroken that her life has ended in this terrible way.”

“Are you bitter that you were falsely arrested?”

“No.”

“Are you going to sue?”

“No.”

“What was it like to discover her body?” asked a reporter.

Philip sheltered his eyes from the bright lights of the television camera. As he looked past the crowd of media people surrounding him, he saw Camilla sitting quietly on a bench watching him.

“Excuse me,” said Philip as he pushed through the reporters and made his way to where Camilla was. “Am I glad to see you.”

“Oh, Philip. Are you all right?”

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

“They towed your car, but I was able to get your bags.”

On the steps outside, he said, “I’m really glad you were there. I can’t tell you how much it means to me. I want to hug you and kiss you, but I don’t want to have them take our picture at the same time. Do you know what I feel like?”

“Crying?”

“That’s right. How’d you know that?”

“Because I love you. Come on. My car’s in the lot,” said Camilla.

He took hold of her hand and they headed for the parking lot. “There’s something I must ask you,” he said.

“What?”

“When you heard I had been arrested.”

“Yes?”

“Did you think it was true? That I killed her?”

“No. Not for an instant.”